The Catholic Counter-Reformation

Point 147. Royal paternalism

The collapse of our present capitalo-socialist world will probably come about abruptly. It will, however, open a long period of transition, during which – not without the assistance of the Immaculate Heart of Mary – a royal authority ought to leave the people to go, rather than forcing them, from a democratic, secular, republican state to the French Catholic monarchy, an organ for the spontaneous rebirth of the people’s liberty, property and fraternity. All that the democratic State had monopolised will be returned to the governance of the restored and reorganised national community. Then we shall feel that we have come to life again, under a regime that is eminently paternal.

1. Knowledge had been taken control of by the State, the protector-protégé of Money, “ rationalist and anti-heroic ” (Schumpeter). Monopolised by the Protestant and Masonic Ministry of National Education and today by one that is socialo-communist, education was diverted from its true ends, which are religion, culture, science, research and information, and used as an instrument for secularising and collectivising the masses.

Education will be returned to the great bodies of the nation, under the benevolent control of the Church and of the State. It will be organised and remunerated by the provinces and municipalities, the corporations and private foundations, which will have every freedom to create academies, research laboratories, cultural centres.

2. Power, jealously monopolised by the possessing and ruling class, will be devolved – in all that does not strictly pertain to regal powers – upon the new elites who will naturally assume them, to fathers of families, to local magistrates, to mayors of municipalities, to heads of firms and enterprises, to professionals, and to that countless aristocracy of heads of the armed forces, diplomats, magistrates, rectors of universities and directors of the social communication media, of engineers.

These authorities, spontaneously restored and recognised, will immediately share in this paternal prestige, “ paternalistic ” as it was considered with such contempt in the times of democracy. This paternal authority is both gentle and firm, like an admirable ray of our Heavenly Father’s wise and gracious authority.

3. Possessions, now drained by the big financial organisations on the one hand and by the State on the other, concurrently assuming the functions of tax department, national banker, and financial redistribution and allocation, will no longer be eroded, losing all their value and causing galloping inflation, in the rush of savings to the big financial centres, from families to the State, from the provinces to Paris, where they are lost in grand but aberrant plans.

Possessions will remain within the confines of the family, retaining their exchange value, and acting as a means of investment between houses of good reputation, assuring for those who are the true creators of wealth all the deserved profit of their salary, their savings and their patrimony.

Thus, the nation will no longer be a people of regimented know-nothings, of irresponsible pawns of the administration, of assisted salary-earners, but, “ bristling with freedoms ” as was the France of old (Funck-Brentano), rid of their irresponsible controllers, parasites and highway thieves, the people will bloom, become ennobled, and slowly raise themselves towards the light.